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August 08, 2006

Sometimes "false but accurate" is just bad news

"Lemming suicide is fiction," according to snopes.com. The myth that the Arctic rodents threatened by competition for food periodically hurl themselves off cliffs into the sea was launched by the Disney film White Wilderness, where "captive lemmings were herded over a cliff into a river." In the manner of "consumers" of the trendy "false-but-accurate" news report, "generations of TV-watching schoolchildren grew up on the Disney nature films, and the myth of lemming suicide persists to this day." The jury is still out on suicidal behavior among human populations threatened by competition in the marketplace of ideas. (www.fauna illustration of the Arctic Lemming, Dicrostonyx torquatus, in winter and summer colors)

Designated a victim-state by the Left, Israel did not live up to expectations. To begin with (and despite being under constant Arab attacks from the day of its foundation in 1948), Israel has been internally stable and politically mature. Unlike most post-war emerging states that followed decolonisation, it did not experience widespread corruption, dictatorship or military takeover. From the beginning it was the only democracy in the Middle East, and through hard work, planning and foreign aid its people built a thriving economy.

ShrinkWrapped: If all you know about what's going on in the Middle East is from the
media -- the mainstream media, whom many of us like to take to task --
you see a story where this mighty war machine, the Israelis, is
wantonly killing innocent children for no apparent reason . . . and
this story is being repeated time and again. I think an awful lot of the press is very lazy . . . they've been taught in journalism school that their job is to present a
story, not to tell the truth or find out what the facts are. And their
storyline is that there's a victim and an aggressor -- also known as an
oppressor -- and they will fit everything into that storyline.

Siggy: The
real problem is that the media will present them as moral equals . . .
to the Israelis or to the West.

Dr. Sanity: It's a deification of victimhood, and whoever is the biggest victim has the most moral points.

Neo: When we talk about victimhood, it seems to me that the practice
of therapy and the mainstreaming of therapeutic ideas and stances might
somehow have played into this phenomenon.

ShrinkWrapped: I think it's actually a misapplication of therapeutic
concepts . . . Originally, therapy was designed to help people become
aware of . . . their own unconscious motives . . . so that they would
have more control over their behavior, and when they were placing
themselves in the role of victim, they would be able to stop doing that
. . . The other place where the ideas of therapy were misapplied was as
soon as someone became a victim, they became resolved of all
responsibility for their own behavior.

Modern wars are as much about propaganda as they are about battles being fought in the trenches. Which is why an ideological media that believes themselves to be part of the story -- and that believes themselves responsible for revealing “larger truths” (which, naturally, they decide upon, and which flow conveniently from their ideology) -- is so very dangerous to a democracy, particularly when they pose as objective or neutral observers but are not, in fact, constrained by any sense of journalistic ethics redounding to that pose. Which is problematic precisely because when the information from which the people are being asked to form their judgments is being massaged and finessed through a front-ended ideological filter in an effort to help us reach the “correct” conclusion, then democracy becomes nothing more than the righteous mask placed over a sham in order to disguise its ugliness beneath a veneer of moral authority.

» MidEast War: 89 from Pajamas Media
August 8 2006 12:00 PDT War News (Blogs Opinion below) 13:54 PDT Party at the UN: "An Arab League delegation accused the Security Council on Tuesday of standing by idly while weeks of fighting between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah... [Read More]

Tracked on August 08, 2006 at 05:04 PM

» Reuters jumps the shark? from The Anchoress
I dont know. The blogosphere is certainly swarming (and with ample justification) around the myriad pieces of evidence which suggest that Reuters is - at best - egregiously sloppy and - at worst - destructively deceitful. There is stuff every... [Read More]

Tracked on August 09, 2006 at 11:44 AM

» Weds. Mid-day Links from Maggie's Farm
Iranians claim to have cloned a sheep? Any relation to my post on goat genitals? Perhaps their women dislike scratchy beards, but the goats and sheep are used to it.So DO IT, already. Olmert still hanging fire. He wants a war where no-one gets hurt. Wrong [Read More]

Tracked on August 09, 2006 at 01:32 PM

» Friday Ark #99 from Modulator
We'll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and....? We will add you... [Read More]

Tracked on August 11, 2006 at 02:47 PM

» Cease-fires and civil wars from Mike's Noise
One has to wonder how many Israelis or Jews would have died during the last 60 years if Israel had continued to play victim, and let Arab nations like Syria and Egypt and Jordan destroy the Jewish state. [Read More]

Tracked on August 15, 2006 at 01:46 AM

Comments

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People wanting to get into journalism usually say it's because they want to become "advocates" for social justice.

They say they want to become citizens of the world.

The facts of whatever they report on are lost in that fog and the journalism schools promote liberal ideology in its place.

Excellent post. But you can take it further. If politics is about power, and if the Marxist victim-oppressor narrative is a politically-motivated narrative (and probably not truly believed-in - most political narratives are intended as boob-bait), then what is the Real Goal?

Lemming suicide is myth, but did you know that a pregnant oryx antelope in southern africa will reabsorb her fetus in times of extreme drought and corresponding resource depletion and biological stress when survival of mother and child is in doubt?

Another interesting survival strategy comes from our friend down under, the mother kangaroo, who is said to toss her joey [reminds me of the Rats in Connecticut, who tossed Hadassah Lieberman's Joey yesterday] from the pouch allowing it "to die to conserve her own body reserves during famine while keeping the embryo she is carrying in the uterus dormant until the food supply is replenished":

Fetal absorption is a survival strategy of not only deer and antelope, but of other prey species, even rabbits, as well.

The human body will also respond to excessive stress by spontaneous abortion. The need to protect a woman "in a delicate condition" probably comes from this.

Evolution would necessarily protect the fertile, mature female, instead of untried fetus. Nature also guards against depletion of numbers by quickly making the body fertile again and sexually receptive.

Pat is right on target with her comments. There was a fascinating study done on the growth rings of mammouth tusks to try and answer the question of whether loss of habitat or excessive predation by homo sapiens with clovis point spears played the greater role in its extinction. If the growth rings were consistantly stunted, showing prolonged calcium depletion, that would indicate that resource depletion and climate change killed the mammoths. If there were periods of calcium depletion over several years followed by longer periods of accretion, that would indicate an animal population trying to shorten intervals between reproduction and rebuild depleted numbers: precisely the pattern seen in modern elephant herds subject to extensive culling. An elephant gestates for 22 months, and the mammoths showed two year intervals of calcium loss followed by less than five years of accretion. Conclusion. Elephants were trying to replensih their numbers and the killer ape was the likely cause of their downfall.

So true. This journalistic approach is a great menace to realism, and it's even worse in Europe and in the Muslim world. A fake grasp of reality leads to wrong reactions.
Like Hawking, I'm really pessimistic about where this is all going...